Aging Capriciously

Time consuming generally means something that takes a great deal of time. To consume means to eat, so something that is “time consuming” literally eats our time. Have you ever made a list of time eaters? Probably they will be different from time wasters. We have already seen that time wasters generally have little or no value, However, time consumers may have a lot of value but they still take a great deal of time to accomplish. It is time consuming to paint your house, find a new babysitter or complete your B.A. degree. Nevertheless, none of these things is a waste of time. There are so many time consuming activities that we could do and that would add value to our lives.

How can we get over the hurdle that these large consumptions of time present? We have so many things do to; it is hard to spend a large amount of time on any one activity or effort. Time consumers bog us down and force us to ignore other time activities that will be screaming for our attention. I was amazed to read that Truman Capote spent ten years writing and researching his novel in “Cold Blood.” It simply amazes me that someone could spend ten years on such an activity. Of course, his effort was well worth the time spent. How long should we invest in one activity? How can we tell when a time consumer really will be worth the effort? Is there any way to measure the value of time consumers?

If I could save time in a bottle,
The first thing that I’d like to do
Is to save every day till eternity passes away,
Just to spend them with you. – Jim Croce (Time in a Bottle)

How often do you want to spend time with someone, but it just passes away? Then you think that you wish you could have saved time and spent more of it with the person then you had. However, eternity just passes away and you never spend the quality time you were hoping to. The problem happens because we are living in the future and not in the present. In the present, time is a gift that we have and we can not save even a single minute.

So who can you spend more time with this week that you have been putting off seeing because you had no time? Who would it cause you the most regrets if they died and you had not shared another moment of eternity with them? What is more important today then spending time with them?

Have you ever wished you could go back in time or wanted to build a time machine and travel back to some event in the distant past? Thinking about time travel is an interesting endeavor. Most of us would like to be able to visit the past. A most provocative theme is that we could somehow make things right by changing what we did wrong. However, whenever this is attempted in the movies or in stories, inevitably something unexpected also changes and the results are never positive. Of course, this does not dissuade anyone from trying.

The question then is can we change the past? We all seem to think that we have to go back in the past to change it. Perhaps it is possible to undo mistakes from the past today. If you could visit the past and undo something or change the course of some event, what would you choose to change? Why? What if you could change it today? Would you try? Why not? What are you doing today that you might regret in the future? Do you have time today to change it?

January – the beginning of a new year. This is the time when we make new resolutions and promises galore. A time to begin over and to make dreams and wishes come true that did not work out the year before. We bring in the New Year as a new born baby, full of promise and youth. Many critics look at the trail of broken promises from bygone years and laugh at the efforts of others. Such people disregard the possibility of hope and change. I say try, try and try again.

You will do a better job this year than you did last year. We can and will continue to grow and change and we will continue to overcome the folly of our past lives. Hope springs eternal in the human breast and what would we be without it? We need to try again and when we fail, we try again. The only failure is when we stop trying. So I say: “Disregard the naysayers, go ahead and set some new goals and new dreams. Stretch your vision and your horizons. People do not perish because of their dreams; they perish because of a lack of dreams.

Out with the old and in with the new! New Years Eve! The end of our past and the beginning of our future! All over the world, we count down the minutes and then seconds until a New Year begins. New Years Eve represents a finish and a time to put failures and bad dreams behind us. New Years day represents a new beginning. We pray and hope that each year will be better than the last. Curiously, we celebrate this ending with a night of wild parties and much drinking.

Do you ever wonder why so many people get drunk on New Years Eve? Is it simply to forget the past or is it to celebrate the past? How many New Years days have been ruined before they even got started? Tonight we drink, tomorrow we make promises about how different our lives will be and what changes we will make. Each New Years is a time of magic. We think it will mean great differences in our lives, but how long do these commitments usually last? Go to the health clubs on New Years day and the parking lots will be full. By early March, the parking lots will be back to their normal contingent of cars. The landscape will be littered with failed promises and failed New Years resolutions. Some may think that they can escape this debacle by simply not making any resolutions. Instead their failures simply remain with them day after day.

Thankfully, we have 365 chances each year to start our life anew. You don’t have to wait until New Years day to begin again. Each day you fail, tomorrow is a new start. If each day your commitments can last a little longer than the last time, you are making progress. You do not have to wait until a New Year to start over. The only failure in life is not starting over again. Each time I fall down and get up again I am a success. Each day that you make a new commitment to try, you are a success. Each time your commitment lasts a little bit longer than the last time you are a success.

So today, before New Year even begins, what are you going to do with your life tomorrow? What have you been putting off that you can now start? What do you want to do to make your life better? Who needs your help in the world? What challenges can you start? What ideas in my blog do you want to go back to? What reflections should you think about some more? What projects do you need to spend more time on? Who could you share my time with? Sharing our lives with others is the greatest success of all. Good Luck and happiness in the New Year.

“If we cannot do everything at once, let us do one at a time.” – Thomas Jefferson. For some of us, starting anything is an overwhelming task. We are bogged down by the complexity of the project and do not know where to start. We fail to remember that all great journeys start with the first step. How many times have you heard that phrase? By now you are probably sick of it! However, if it fails to inspire you, then what will? Rome was not built in a day! A stitch in time saves nine! Haste makes waste! All of these aphorisms are just little tricks to help us remember that we can’t do it all at once.

Anything worth doing takes time may be another cliché but it is also an iron law of the universe. Tiger Woods practices more than 10 hours each day. Wayne Gretsky, Jean Claude Killy, Valentino Rossi and many other great world champions all started when they were less than five years old. If you link genetics, an early start and much time spent in practice, you have a formula for success. Wal-Mart started in 1954 in Bentonville, Arkansas, a town most of us never heard of. In 1985, most of us had never even been to or heard of a Wal-Mart. By 2005, it was the largest corporation in the world – an overnight success?

All too many people look for luck to make their day. They hope to win the lottery, strike it big at the local casino or score on some big class action lawsuit. Waiting for luck is the greatest waste of time I can think of. We make our own luck. Were Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, two of the richest people in the world lucky? Did they get their money in a crackerjack box? If you want to get lucky, start by putting that one foot forward and then follow it with the other. If you want to have a great life and a great adventure, start now. What is one thing that you can do today that will start you on that great journey? Pick one thing today that and do it. What is the next step that you can take on your great adventure?

According to one theory of time, events mark time. Without events, there is no time. We measure time by births, deaths, disasters, significant milestones etc. But is this all that time really is, the passing of events? Sometimes it seems this way as we count the weeks by each day passing and the months by each week passing and the years by each month passing. The seasons pass and soon our brief lives are over. The historians tell us what has been significant and what is worth remembering.

However, do we really only measure time by the passage of events? What if we stopped chronicling our bios, happenings and daily events? What if we could simply forget them as soon as they passed? Have you ever dwelled on some event long after it was over? Or, kept repeating some problem or issue in your mind? Some people can do this all their lives. We might tell them to “get over it” and move on but they are stuck in the event. They are still living in high school or college or with their first love. These individuals seem to be unaffected by the passage of events. They have found the one significant event for them and they want to stay with it forever. We all know somebody who fits this description. They cannot seem to move on with their lives. The big event might have been a tragedy, a touchdown pass or a fantastic vacation, but they will relive this over and over again. To some degree, we all do this. There are key people and events in our lives that we will never forget. However, we all must move on to continue growing and developing. To stay in the past is to relinquish the opportunity for new pleasures and new adventures. The past is safe though and the future is uncertain. That is what keeps many people stuck. Who wants to take the risk associated with moving forward and embracing the unknown?

How do you deal with the flow of life? Are you sometimes stuck in the past? Where are you stuck? What do you need to do to move on with your life? What events or issues can or should you forget and just let go of? What is holding you back? Are you afraid of the future?

Are we getting close to the “end of time” or just the end of the year? Have you ever really thought about when time would end? Will time end only when the world and the universe end? Or maybe time will just quit, like a watch that stops running. Some religions believe that time ends on judgment day. Do you think that there are any clocks in heaven? What about hell? Does the devil track time for us? What about Purgatory? “Purgatory (Lat., “purgare”, to make clean, to purify) in accordance with Catholic teaching is a place or condition of temporal punishment for those who, departing this life in God’s grace, are, not entirely free from venial faults, or have not fully paid the satisfaction due to their transgressions.” (New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12575a.htm ).

The Catholic Church teaches that we need to spend in Purgatory for certain offenses. Since the punishment is temporal and not eternal, do you suppose they have clocks in Purgatory? Who do you suppose winds them up? Can you imagine spending 500 years in Purgatory and watching the clock until you are released?
Perhaps, time will wear out when we get tired of keeping time.

People have been thinking about time since the first human beings walked the earth. Time seems to be part of the human psyche. If humans did not have time, they would certainly have created it. It is hard to imagine anyplace where we would not mark time. Heaven qualifies as one place though where there would seem to be no reason to mark time. Why keep track of time when everything is eternal and unchanging? Heaven should be a place where there are no goals, no accomplishments, no meetings, no places to get to, no tasks to complete, no projects due, no emails to answer and no shortage of time. If any of these things existed in heaven, then we would need to track time.

So what do we do in heaven? We all seem to want to get there, but what do we do with our “time” when we are there? I guess we just play all day since play does not require us to track time. Can you think of anything else that does not require us to mark time? Perhaps if we could just play all day, then time would end. Would little children invent time? Children do not seem to worry about time as much as adults. What if we played more and worked less? Could we cut time down some? Can you “end time” when it is just play time? As adults we become more and more fixed on the idea of time and the limitations that time places on our lives.

Maybe we should create a “holiday” each year where time stops. A day when you do not have to keep track of time or when time does not matter. It is difficult to think of living a single day when you are not keeping track of time. I guess you will just have to wait until you get to heaven for time to stop. Do you suppose anyone wears watches in heaven? When was the last time, you were able to forget about time? How long did it last? What does it take for you to forget about time?

Making up for lost time can be bittersweet. I have a daughter who has not talked to me for many years now. I think of the time that has gone by and how we could have spent it together doing things we could never afford to do when she was younger. I think of how as adults we could and should have become good friends with talks by the fireplace and walking in the woods. She is over forty now and I am past 60 and the clock keeps ticking and ticking. I think of the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years that keep moving on by, each moment lost forever to us as this blanket of silence shrouds our lives. Time lost forever, or can it be made up? What if she suddenly decided that she wanted to have a relationship with me? Could we make up the lost time? If we started today to try to get to know each other; imagine the events that have changed our lives, the places we have been to, the books we have read, the movies we have seen, the funerals and weddings we have been to, the jobs and careers we have changed, the grandchildren we have helped raise. So much that has changed each of us.

Difficult to imagine making up lost time, nevertheless, few of us would not try if given the opportunity. It is a bittersweet opportunity because while we are trying to make up the lost time, we may feel joy at the opportunity but also anger at the waste of time that could and should have been prevented. It might be water under the dam, but it will always seem like a waste. I have known brothers and sisters, parents and siblings and former friends who did not talk to each other for over fifty years. Unfortunately, some of them died and there went any possibility to make up for lost time. There are no guarantees in life and if you choose to waste time or lose time, perhaps you will never be able to make it up. It might be too late when you finally realize your mistake and ask yourself WHY? You will be left with regrets about what might or could or should have been.

Perhaps you have no control over your lost time. Time spent in jail, time spent recovering from an accident, and time spent in a relationship that was wrong may all constitute lost time. Lost time is time away from life that could have been lived much differently. It is time that could have been spent more productively and happily. Can this time be made up? Better to not lose it in the first place. But if you have lost it, then do your best to get on with you life. Live each day the best you can. As they say with money, don’t throw good money after bad. Do not throw good time after bad. The lost time is over and you have the rest of your life to live. If you can live each day the best you can, you will be able to put the lost time behind you and perhaps even forget it someday. Then again, maybe the time that was lost was a lesson and you needed to hear the message it was sending. A good friend of mine was fond of saying: “There are no mistakes in life only lessons to be learned.” I think of this comment often. It is a good lesson to remember.

Do you have any lost time to make up? Are you currently losing time that you should not be losing? Have you thought about how you can stop losing this time? What can you do today to make it up? What might you feel regrets about someday if you do not change your life today?

A gift of time! In today’s time deprived world, this might just be the greatest gift of all. With everyone so busy, time becomes the most precious commodity. Bestowing such a gift on others could show how much you care for or love them. You might be poor in terms of money, wealth, material goods but you are as rich as Bill Gates in terms of time. The richest people in the world have no more time than the poorest. In fact, they may have less since they are so busy earning and accumulating money.

Each of us has it in our power to give a gift of time both to others and to ourselves. Children, relatives, loved ones and friends might all find your gift of time more meaningful and valuable than anything else you could give them. Can you imagine a Christmas where no presents or money was exchanged? The only gifts that would be exchanged would be gifts of time. It would probably create havoc in the economy. No one would go into debt during Christmas and the mass hysteria associated with the Christmas shopping ritual would be destroyed. Why go into debt when you can make others happier by giving something even more precious than money and something you can give for free? A gift of time is a gift of humanity. It is a gift of yourself.

When was the last time you gave anyone a “gift” of time. How often do you share yourself with others? Are you always “too busy” to help someone else? Can you think of someone whom you could give a gift of time? How does it feel to create this gift and to give it away? What if you gave a gift of time to someone each week? What if you gave yourself a gift of time each week?